In addition to the simple text files, Hive also supports several other binary storage formats that can be used to store the underlying data of the tables. These include row-based storage formats such as Hadoop SequenceFiles and Avro files as well as column-based (columnar) storage formats such as ORC files and Parquet.

Columnar storage formats store the data column-by-column, where all the values of a column will be stored together as opposed to a row-by-row manner in row-based storages. For example, if we store the users table from our previous recipe in a columnar database, all the user IDs will be stored together and all the locations will be stored together. Columnar storages provide better data compression as it's easy to compress similar data of the same type that are stored together. Columnar storages also provide several performance improvements for Hive queries as well. Columnar storages allow the processing...